No time for the details? Scroll through the summary below to understand my key contributions and takeaways.
I led a team of 5 graduate students in researching and designing an online community that adheres to core scientific literature on community design, catered to a niche community, and had a viable business plan.
We conducted mixed methods research, created a business plan, and developed a high fidelity Figma prototype.
Our solution was voted 'most innovative community', gained strong market interest, and is currently in the seed funding stage.
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The project generated strong early-adopter interest from Literati Bookstore interviewees and survey respondents. Our team is currently streamlining the socializing/reading experience, and looking for funding.
Book Nook is an online community for readers who want to make reading social. The community is centered around public annotations and discussions — all centered around books.
The main goals of our community was to:
The challenge was: to create a novel social platform that adhered to the literature around online communities, designed for a culturally distinct community, and backed by strong research rationale.
Our first meeting's brainstorming revolved around the issues with social media; everything from doxing, sexism, racism, and fake news, all the way to irrelevant content, inactive communities and bot accounts.
This is how we came up with the idea for Book Nook.
The idea we landed on was a social reading experience that used books as focus points for discussion and community.
Unlike current market leaders, which focus on recommendations and written reviews, we wanted our platform to incorporate discussions between readers and authors.
Now that we had a central concept, we needed to assemble core principles upon which this community should be designed.
Our team collectively prioritized a shortlist of readings that helped design for:
We leveraged 7 major principles to inform our communities feature design:
While our team understood that online book communities fell short in delivering meaningful social connections for readers, we did not yet understand which offered the most opportunities for social connection and which chose to focus only on book consumption.
We evaluated 5 major competitors on dimensions like collaboration, design, and moderation functionality.
We also benchmarked community-building features to isolate strengths and weaknesses.
While our team now had an understanding of the American and Chinese book reading application market, we still had some key problems.
We had reached an impasse in discussions: we couldn't figure out how to encourage readers to socially engage, without distracting them from reading. We were missing deeper understanding on how users discover, consume, and share thoughts about books.
In order to validate this market opportunity, and understand how and where readers socially engage around reading, we decided to conduct interviews with readers.
We wanted our application to attract casual and serious readers, and tapped into our social networks, local library, and Literati (local book-store) in order to recruit interviewees.
Using a semi-structured interview protocol, we:
The questions focused on topics like reading habits, perspectives on book clubs, pain points, but we created 2 scripts for the 2 different groups.
We combined our interview insights with our survey insights during our Affinity Mapping stage.
Once our team affinity mapped our interview and survey insights, we aggregated a few primary insights that drastically changed our ideas around how and why people discover, consume, and share thoughts about books.
Avid readers (read 'every day') are more likely to have engaged, or currently engage in book clubs and attend book events.
Casual readers (read equal to, or less than 'a few times a week') are highly unlikely to engage in social environments or events around reading.
But they are very much a part and aware of online discourse around books — primarily because they use such forums for socially validated book discovery.
Survey responders reported that recommendations from friends and family, captivating book bio, and engaging plot were their top book selection criteria.
Bookstore recommendation cards and bestseller lists were inconsequential.
Avid and casual readers were hesitant to express their thoughts about books in online forums.
Whether it be expert reviews or plain comments, both groups expressed a social expectation of intelligent commentary in such forums.
We spent our remaining 2 weeks rapidly developing the screens, mapped out to each of our major research findings. After some guerilla testing for critical usability errors, we were ready with our app.
Book Nook was the distillation of our research insights, and design decisions; all aimed at making reading social, positive, and fun.
In order to create this desired effect, we focused on a few key features.
The homepage feed features personalized recommendations based on friends and followed authors, while spotlighting local author events. This aims to reflect the interconnected, social process of book discovery from our research.
Each title includes an informal discussion space for readers to swap reactions. Lower stakes than rigid book clubs, these forums build bonds around beloved books. Integrated reading and annotation fosters fluid meaning-making, with comments tightly linked to passages.
The reader enables social annotations and text customization for personalized, multimedia consumption. We reduce friction in toggling between reading and reactions to nurture collaborative literary analysis.
The notification feed allows customizable engagement with other readers' and authors’ activity. Users can follow friends, favorite authors, and notable critics directly from their profiles in order to view a personalized, curated feed of public updates.
In working together, the team talked to several users, professors, and experts, several of whom expressed genuine interest in a full-fledged application.
After exceeding our project requirements completely, our team began discussing our next steps:
Assessing market need, profitability, and our go-to market strategy.